This post, which can be seenhere, shows where things were on New Years’ Day 2012 in the Farr v. Handy race. In comparing the East and West Lane County Commissioner races with the Farr v. Handy race, some trends become visible.

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What is also interesting is how consistently Springfield residents voted. The Springfield results for Mayor and City Council winners, when compared, show that all five citywide winners pretty consistently dominated the election. This goes to reinforce the impression from Sid Leiken’s 2010 County Commissioner victory that Springfield residents are pretty satisfied with their local government.

Here we plan to dig into the electoral geography of the 2012 Eugene Mayoral Primary election a bit. The Eugene Mayoral results by Ward are very interesting. It is important to get some standard for comparison. The most directly comparable election was when Mayor Jim Torrey faced six opponents in 2000. These two elections provide an estimate of the maximu each candidate could hope to receive.

There are lots of ways to compare how they did, but here are four: the overall vote percentage, how many wards did each take first place, how many wards did each break 50 percent, and how many wards did each win by an overwhelming vote.

Overall vote percentage: Torrey won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2000. Piercy won 63 percent of the vote this year.

Number of wards in first place: Torrey took first place in all eight wards. Piercy did so in seven.

Number of wards with more than half the votes: Torrey broke 50 percent in seven wards. Piercy did so in six wards.

Number of wards with with an overwhelming share of votes: Torrey broke 60 percent in six wards. Piercy did so in only three wards.

Torrey was a more successful candidate citywide despite the fact that Piercy spent four times as much money as Torrey. Neither had opponents spending much money.

This analysis makes it clear that Piercy’s strength is based on the three southern wards. What is interesting is that Piercy received approximately the same percentage of votes in two of the widely recognized “pro-business” wards, Ward 4 (Poling) and Ward 8 (Pryor), as she did in Ward 7 (Ortiz) which is held by an ally. The business community didn’t even try to challenge Ortiz this year. These results make it very clear that Ward 7 is becoming, or is already, a fifth “pro-business” ward.